Tuesday, February 21, 2017

It's no secret in the tech world that IBM's artificial intelligence program is poised to do amazing things in terms of predicting and improving the likeabilty, accuracy, efficacy, and even tone of communications. ANY communications. H&R Block is even advertising this year that they are using it as part of their tax preparation process.

So, it occurred to me, can we--as writers--use Watson in some way to improve our own writing?

Yes, I think we can. Tone is a huge part of writing, especially in particular genres. We need our opening chapters to draw people in, to give them that sense of familiarity and comfort that tells them they are IN the genre they are expecting. That doesn't mean that the tone or likeability of the text in a work of horror will be the same as that in a romance, obviously. But I wondered if it might mean that there would be some commonalities in scores between best-sellers within a genre.

And there is. I also found that books that didn't do as well often didn't share those commonalities.

You can paste in a chapter of your work, or someone else's work, and get immediate feedback on everything from the emotions displayed. I used a sample from the first two chapters of Stephanie Garber's AMAZING gothic fantasy Caraval that just hit the New York Times bestseller list to generate some screenshots.

This is the overall document level result for that sample first two chapters, which analyze the text both at the document and the sentence level.

As you can see from the above, the results are broken down by emotion, language style, and social tendencies. Each of those results is also provided in a more precise breakdown showing, sentence by sentence, what contributes to a score. If you want to see where you exhibit what will (most likely) be interpreted as joy in your pages, you simply click on that emotion and each sentence that tends toward joy will be highlighted in the text.

An explanation of each result is also provided so that you understand the function of each result.

It also analyzes the style of language and shows the specific instances that display the tone being analyzed:

Similarly, social tendencies like openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional range--all of which contribute to likeability, can be analyzed on a granular level.

Using this tool, you can make sure that your writing says exactly what you want it to say, and you can tweak it online until you are confident.

About the Author

Martina Boone is the author of Compulsion,Persuasion, and Illusionin the romantic Southern Gothic Heirs of Watson Island trilogy from Simon & Schuster, Simon Pulse, and the new upcoming romance for adult readers, Lake of Destiny, a magical exploration of destiny, family, healing, and the often twisted path to love set in the Highlands of Scotland (and featuring delicious men in kilts.)

MARTINA ON TWITTER

FAVORITE QUOTES

March 1st 5 Pages Workshop

Our March workshop will open for submissions on Saturday, March 3rd at noon, EST. Participants will be mentored by two published authors through three rounds of revisions and receive additional feedback from our literary agent mentor on their first five pages and their pitch.The agent mentor will offer additional feedback to the best of the five manuscripts in the workshop.

Featured Post

Happy Monday! We hope our American readers had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend. We're grateful to have another round of giveaways up for...

VISITORS

WRITING CONTEST

To keep subscribers from getting inundated by posts, we've moved our agent-judged writing contests off to Adventures in YA Contests, a separate site just for AdventuresInYAPubilshing.com contests. Stay tuned for a new contest starting soon!

AdventuresInYAPublishing.com sometimes receives books for free from publishers or authors in the hope that we will mention them on the blog, but otherwise we receive no compensation for writing posts or content on this site. We have no material connections to the brands, products, or services mentioned, except those by individual site members in their capacity as authors. Our posts often include convenient links, and a small commission may be paid on some of these if you purchase the item after clicking. We use the income from this and from sidebar advertising to help defray the costs of postage for mailing books to giveaway winners. Inclusion of a book on the site does not imply an endorsement unless the individual who authored the post specifically states that they have personally read the book or believes the product or service mentioned will add value to our readers.